Posts Tagged ‘Disc Golf’

Not everyone may know that I’ve started a Disc Golf business (retail), but I have. As part of that I’m learning about the world of import/export and international trade. To go with the whole international trade thing I’ve been using the website alibaba.com

Just like Costco, you can find things which are pretty hilarious on the website. For example:

These are pictures taken at the Duck Golf at Robert Burnaby this past weekend (Dec. 8th, 2012). I haven’t looked through all of them, because there’s 666 of them, but at least some of them look interesting, there’s a number of sequences of people’s drives.

This is actually pretty cool, I used to play ball golf back in the day, but gave it up for various reasons which I won’t go into here. That said it’s still very popular, and one of it’s biggest tournaments is the Masters. This year it was won by Bubba Watson.

So why do you or I care? Well I care because of the interesting bit of information that Bubba Watson is also a card carying member of the PDGA, yup the Professional Disc Golf Association… that’s kind of cool. Wonder if there’s a mini-golf organization and if he’s a member of it too…

Today I thought I was going to have to make a tough decision, not an irrevocable one, but still a tough one. Whether or not I should go Pro in the Duck Golf series. On some level I’m really not good enough, at this point I can have no real expectation that I’d be able to win any of the events, or that I’d even be in the money. But based on my historic performance over the last couple of years, my scores in Amateur Advanced (what I have been playing) would have been good enough to not finish last in any of the tournaments.

Also, if I went Pro, I’d probably practice more and take things more seriously. But with the car trouble from yesterday I can put off that decision for another month, which I’m ok with doing. It means I can decide later if I want to donate $40 a month to play Pro, or if I want to pay $30 a month and probably win it back in plastic (Amateurs get paid in prizes instead of money).

I started packing my car to go to the Whistler Duck Golf, or rather I went down to my car to pack it for the tournament, and found that I’d managed to leave something electric on and that my battery was dead.

Unfortunately, it was late on a Friday night, everyone (practically) is out of town doing other things. I considered renewing my BCAA membership, and although it’s a good idea, I couldn’t justify it to allow me to go to the tournament. It simply made the tournament too expensive to be worth travelling to.

So a post on Facebook and I’ve got a jump arranged for Saturday morning. No tournament for me.

Last night when I closed pre-registration there were 40 people on the list for the Ace Race, this year I went with 50 player’s packages which would be about right for previous years. Today however there were a lot of people who showed up without registering, so many in fact that the 10 remaining player’s packages were sold, then the player’s packages for the 3 people who weren’t able to be there today were sold, then mine and Karin’s player’s packages were sold, then we made up a couple of packages out of previous year’s discs, and a couple of people split player’s packages and ordered their own. So in total I think we had 60 people show up this year, which is pretty awesome. The weather couldn’t have been better.

Karin was a real trooper with all the help that she provided (all day), I really couldn’t have done it without her. Keeping on top of everything, handling food and money and discs and unsolicited advances. Especially after a couple of rough days (4am false fire alarm) and a long drive to Abbotsford for Pro-D, it was amazing. Thank you!

Last time that I uploaded my pedometer data to the tracking program I was disappointed to see that my average daily steps had fallen from 4,509 to 4,371. This bothered me, and I’ve been working on reversing the trend. Today after the upload my daily average steps for the year are now up to 4,521 (3.39km). I’m pretty pleased with that. Keep in mind that’s the average of everyday over all of 2011 so far, and includes all those lazy weekends when you don’t leave the house or the couch.

The big change that has made this happen is the reintroduction of Disc Golf into my weekly activity calendar. I like Disc Golf, and enjoy it. Fundamentally it gives you a reason to walk around (potentially a lot).

For the record my actual long term daily target is 4,200 steps/day, so I’m happy to still be above that and to still be able to increase it. I know that they recommend that you do 10,000 steps/day but with these more accurate pedometers it’s difficult to do. So I picked a goal that seemed achievable but not necessarily easy. If I keep the golfing up, I might make it to 5,000 steps/day, we’ll see.

I think this time around for the Ace Race players packages that I’ll have them shipped to Blaine and then go and pick them up myself. It’s already saving me about 30% on shipping costs, and it hopefully I’ll also save on duty/taxes, but we’ll see. I’ll wait until after I’ve actually successfully done it before I talk about how I’m going to do it, as I wouldn’t want to plug a methodology that in future I might not actually recommend.

Every year I do one of these Ace Race tournaments, and there are other times when I order significant quantities of Discs from Discraft whether that be for an event, or for Burnaby Ultimate & Disc Sports or some other reason. Typically they ship using UPS, and realistically I don’t do a lot of shipping or ordering of things to be shipped, especially “internationally”.

Each time I do it, I get annoyed. What I’m buying are goods manufactured in the US, covered by NAFTA, and yet I always have to pay taxes and duty. Ok, hard things to avoid (legally speaking). But there’s always this extra charge “brokerage fee”, which tends to be about equal to the duty, which is just an irritating fee which doesn’t add any value to me. In truth it feels usury.

The thing is, I do it so infrequently, and it’s such a large area of legislation that I never have the motivation to look into it further until AFTER I’ve become annoyed by the most recent brokerage fee, at which point I no longer am motivated to look into it, as I’ve already had to pay. I finally contacted UPS to see what I can do to avoid the brokerage fee, and it turns out there’s an option… it may not be a good option but here it is:

Duties and Taxes apply on all shipments imported into Canada with a value over $20.00 CAD. The UPS Brokerage fee is applied on all shipments being sent Standard service. You can avoid this fee by requesting to have your shipment sent UPS Air.

So then the question becomes is the brokerage fee going to be more than the extra cost of having it shipped UPS Air instead of UPS ground? Maybe, maybe not, but at least with air shipping you’re also going to get it sooner, which means that at the very least you’re getting something for the money you spend even if it doesn’t necessarily save you any money. I think I’ll request UPS Air shipping this time around.

Today I filled out the form that registered this year’s Ace Race (Disc Golf tournament), I’m losing track as to if this will be the 5th or 6th one of these I’ve done. It looks like there’s more interest this year with one being run in Kelowna and Cambell River/Comox, there also might be one in Tsawwassen. Which really just means that people will have more choice and won’t have to go to the one in Burnaby this year. That’s cool. It’s good for the sport overall to have more interest and to get more discs in more people’s hands.

Full promotion will likely start next week once a few more details are ironed out.